Clio says, fie on your facile preconceptions about how Last Great Scorer grades historians
While I am usually all over the idea that judgements about What People Really Achieved can be crude and based on coarse indicators, I am not entirely sure that Aditya Chakrabortty persuades me that the late Lord Dacre, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, is being terribly ill-used by the new biography and the reviews thereof out of sheer career ill-fortune.
Chakrabortty so gets marked down for the cliche about Wot Historianz Would Consider A Grate Werk of Hystory ('A fat magisterial book on archdeaconry in 16th-century St Albans' - FAIL). There are all sorts of things that make lasting contribution to the field, and some of them are articles that get cited a lot.
Surely a lot of the schadenfreudery about HTR is about how much in the way of the worldly prizes he accrued, as pointed out in the column, yet, biog and reviewers ask the question: What Wud Posteritee Sai?
What I have so far not noted, but perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places, or not looking in the right ones, is people who were HTR's students or influenced by him and owe him lasting debt of gratitude for his role on their making as historians.
(Compare/contrast here, the late, great, and massively prolific, Roy Porter, who did both the serious academic stuff and was also about popularisation and accessibility.)
How influential was his work on historical debates? - one of the reviews I saw contrasted him with AJP Taylor, another popular historian and media don, whose Origins of the Second World War apparently continues to be read and engaged with, even if it's to tear down his hypotheses.
I think people are looking at those worldly rewards and going, for what, exactly?
But maybe later judgements will pick out the real achievements (as opposed to Really Major Blooper) and it is still too soon to tell.
Because the Last Great Scorer does tend to revisit the scores over time, no?
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